The Red Army treated captured German soldiers in the worst possible manner when WW2 ended

If the German Army acted with absolute disregard for the Geneva Conventions of 1929 pertaining to prisoner of war (POW), the Allies, Soviet Russia, America and British acted little better. German POW after the Second World War were treated harshly, to say the least.

Most Western historical literature says the real villains were Stalin's Red Army soldiers who brutalised captured Wehrmacht prisoners, killed outright men from the Waffen SS (After torturing them of course) and what not. The fact is the American, British and Free French armies were no less culpable.

And the savage mentality started from the very top. At the Teheran Conference of the "Big Three" in 1943, Stalin at a dinner on the second day, suggested a toast to eliminating 50,000 men from the German staff. Churchill was aghast at this. Roosevelt, in a humorous tone, suggested killing 49,000 men. His son Elliott chipped in by saying that when the Red Army, American and British rolled into Germany, they would not only wipe out top German soldiers but also thousands of Nazis. The most humane of all, Churchill walked out of the room in anger.

Now if the top leaders harbored such vengeful feelings towards the Germans, such a message that "kill Germans and get away with it" was bound to percolate down to lowest levels of the Allied armies. The Geneva Conventions of 1929 which protected disarmed soldiers were thrown out of the window by all, including the "virtuous" allies.

The Allies captured nearly 11 million German soldiers by the end of the Second World War. Since the bulk of the German army was fighting on the Eastern Front one would expect that the Russians would have taken in most POWs. But surprisingly the Red Army had only 3.1 million POW. The Americans had 3.8 million, the British 3.7 million and even the puny, late comer French had a quarter of a million German prisoners.

It is not surprising that the Russians had lower numbers. Firstly because the Red Army soldiers were killing off all Waffen SS prisoners and even regular German soldiers too were polished off most of the time. Secondly, the German soldiers knew what lay in store for them if captured by the Russians, so before the war ended most rushed off and surrendered to the Americans and the British army.

Among many American units, “take no prisoners” was the motto. For those members of the SS, Wehrmacht and Volkssturm lucky enough to survive capture, death often awaited behind the lines. In the transit from front to rear, hundreds of prisoners were allowed to suffocate, starve or freeze to death in railroad cars.

The Americans herded German POW into a barbed wire fenced in enclosure in millions

AMERICAN CAMPS

But they hardly got a better deal in the hands of the Americans. They were herded in open roofless enclosures called 'Rhineland meadow camps'. The Germans called them Rheinwiesenlager. These camps were over crowded and feeding them was hardly a top priority for the Americans. This is surprising given the fact that it had enough resources. The German POWs were perhaps purposefully starved. The vengeful feeling that Roosevelt harbored towards Germans had seeped down to lower levels.

According to a personal account of a German prisoner...

During the heat I crawl into a hollow in the ground. I wear a coat and boots, with my forage-cap pulled down over my ears; my field bag, in which I have a silver spoon and fork, serves as my pillow. During a thunderstorm one wall of my hollow falls in on me. My coat and socks are wet through and through … How long will we have to be without shelter, without blankets or tents? Every German soldier once had shelter from the weather. Even a dog has a doghouse to crawl into when it rains. Our only wish is finally after six weeks to get a roof over our heads. Even a savage is better housed

According to another German POW...

We would drink our own urine. It tasted terrible, but what could we do? Some men got down on the ground and licked the ground to get some moisture. I was so weak I was already on my knees, when finally we got a little water to drink. I think I would have died without that water. But the Rhine was just outside the wire

The British, though starved of resources, treated German prisoners much better. The Americans and French treated them lousy. The death rate in American camps was four times that of British camps. In the French camps it was 20 times compared to the British.

The mortality rate of German POW in French camps was high

SOVIET CAMPS

The German POW had a bad time in Soviet captivity. More than a third of them died.

This is mainly because of three reasons. First. The prisoners were made to walk. No luxury of transport by train or trucks. These were called "death walks". Considering the distances and harsh climate of Russia, the weakened, disheartened Germans simply collapsed and died. Second. The Russians had little food to feed themselves. Why worry about the bad Germans? Third. The ingrained hatred for Germans in Russian minds. No one care a hoot whether German prisoners lived or died.

THE RED ARMY TOOK NO WAFFEN SS PRISONERS. THEY WERE KILLED OUTRIGHT.

The hatred had been born after the ruthless way the German invaders had behaved in occupied Soviet Union in earlier stages of WW2. And had been fed more by the vitriolic writings by Ilya Ehrenberg which was printed and reprinted in Soviet newspapers. Every Red Army soldiers knew them by heart.

Here is an example.....

The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word ‘German’ is for us the worst imaginable curse. From now on the word ‘German’ strikes us to the quick. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day … If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime … If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing more joyful than a heap of German corpses.

Poems by Alexei Surkov called "I hate" and by Konstantin Simonov called "Kill him" added fuel to the fire.

No wonder that surrendered German soldiers were often shot casually. Passing German POW columns were fired upon by drunk Red Army soldiers. They were robbed of all their personal possessions on capture and marched off to Gulags. Those hardy enough to survive fed on rats as the Soviet captors starved them deliberately.

Most remained in the Soviet Union for years and the those who survived were released only after Khrushchev came to power in 1953. They returned to Germany as broken men.

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Food For Thought

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SOME LESSER KNOWN WW2 FACTS..........After the capitulation of the German Reich Germans of the Czech Sudetenland met the wrath of the Czechs...........The Germans were forced to leave their homes and leave their property............ To identify their nationality they were required to wear clothing to wear "N" ("Nemec" = "German") on their clothes..........Not infrequently, the displaced were brutally killed. The worst massacres occurred in Usti nad Labem, where 2700 German were killed within a few hours............After Hitler's war had been lost, millions of ethnic Germans in regions that are today part of Eastern Europe were expelled -- often under horrendous circumstances............. It has been proven that at least 473,000 people died as they fled or were expelled...........14 million Germans were expelled from their homes in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other Eastern European countries after the war. Only 12 million were able to get to Germany alive. The tragedy of the expulsion of the German civilian population is hardly widely known except amongst Germans and historians...........The Cossacks have always been fiercely independent. In 1941 when the Germans invaded Russia the Cossacks found a way to fight the Stalinist regime. They fought in the Wehrmacht against the Red Army.As the war was ending, the Cossacks found themselves cornered in Austria. All the captured Cossacks were handed over to the Red Army by the British. Women and children included. Knowing full well the sad fate that awaited the Cossacks.A Cossack noted: “The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honor.”..........Men from the Waffen SS were especially picked out for"special treatment" by both the Red Army as well as the American soldiers. The Russians simply tortured and killed any SS soldier they captured. The Americans did the same to a lesser extent. And even after the war ended they were tortured and forced to make confessions..............

We are on.....

We are not "Pro" or "Anti" anybody....

We do not have any bias against any country. All we are trying is to highlight some events in history that are under-reported. The aim is to see the complete picture.

--Editors

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Brutal Mass Rape Of German Women In 1945

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then a young captain in the Red Army and a committed opponent to such outrages, describes the entry of his regiment into East Prussia in January 1945: "Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction READ MORE >>>>

Germany dismembered in 1945

As Germans like to complain, Prussia was the only state abolished by the victors after the Second World War. Brandenburg was dissolved into the German Democratic Republic; West Prussia became Polish; East Prussia was partitioned between Poland and the Soviet Union, which annexed the coastal region around the capital, Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad). Churchill, whose ideas about Germany were at best late Victorian, was convinced that Hitler’s Third Reich was merely a resurgence of Prussian martial imperialism, blamed by his generation for every European conflict since 1860. His loyal fan Bob Boothby went a bit further: East Prussia, he claimed, was ‘the focal point of the infection of Prussian militarism.’ He added that the forcible expulsion of the whole German population was ‘rough but, by God they deserve it!’

That was Churchill’s opinion too. Some 12 million ethnic Germans fled or were driven out of east and central Europe at the end of the Second World War, with Churchill’s enthusiastic approval and British participation (Operation Swallow). This gigantic act of ethnic cleansing, as we would now call it, was euphemized as ‘population transfer,’ on the model of the huge expulsions of Greeks from Turkey and vice versa in 1922.

From http://www.ufppc.org/book-notes-mainmenu-36/11018-book-review-east-prussia-where-credulity-decayed-into-blind-arrogance-.html

Brutal German Soldiers During WW2: Personal Accounts

Müller: "They were building roads, drop-dead gorgeous girls. So we drove by, pulled them into the truck, screwed them and them threw them out again. Boy, they sure cursed at us."READ MORE >>>>

Unseen Images Of the MY LAI MASSACRE

Hell On Earth: East Prussia 1945

The rage of the Soviet soldiers was terrible. There were very few who had not suffered in some way from the Nazi invasion. Most had lost relatives in the war and many had lost their homes and all their belongings under German occupation. The anti-Nazi propaganda of the Soviet Army was so strong that almost every soldier was overwhelmed by an insatiable craving for revenge. The first Germans they met suffered most. Many civilians were indiscriminately killed, women were raped,property was destroyed and German military warehouses plundered.READ MORE >>>>

Persecution of Germans in Czechoslovakia After it Lost The War

Click on image to read more

Japanese Women Raped By American Soldiers During And After WW2

“We too are an army of rapists,” anonymous soldier, letter to the editor, Time Magazine, November 12, 1945. There were also 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture after the Japanese surrender. READ MORE >>>>

Was Patton Killed?

Click on image to read more....

Rape By German Soldiers In Russia During WW2

We largely believed that men of the Wehrmacht were not so amorous and brutal when dealing with women in lands they conquered. A silly illusion. These men were as immoral and boorish as the Russians and Japanese. In fact having sex was encouraged by their commanders as matter of policy. Amorous and lustful men made better fighters and killers, the thinking went. READ MORE >>>>

Wolfsschanze. East Prussia, 1942.

Hitler insisted. I will not leave the Volga!' Zeitzlersaid in a loud voice, 'My Fuhrer! It would be a crime to leave Sixth Army in Stalingrad. That would mean the death or capture of a quarter of a million men. Any hope of freeing them would be in vain. The loss of this army would break the back of the eastern front.' READ MORE>>>>

Twisted American Marines At Guadalcanal

During the fight for Guadalacanal in 1942-43, the American marines led a miserable life. They were short of rations, suffered from dysentery and the creepy-crawlies of the jungle, not to forget the incessant Japanese attacks, made some of them unhinged.

After a skirmish with the Jap soldiers, some marines put the heads of three dead enemy soldiers on bamboo poles facing the Japanese side. The commander of the unit was furious and told them that only animals did such things.

A marine replied, "That's right, Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals. We eat like animals. Treated like animals. What the fuck do you expect?"

From 'When All Hell Broke Loose, History of WW2' by MAX HASTINGS

Points To Ponder....

Most of us feel nauseated by what the Russians, Americans and British (not to mention the French and others) did to a defeated German nation. An argument goes that the ordinary German was not guilty of what Hitler and his henchmen did.

True. But it can also be seen that Germans happily settled in occupied countries and used slave labor.

But was the ordinary German on the street guilty? What could he or she have done against the Nazi state? Nothing. Most of us live in democracies today but how much real influence do we have on the government?

Did the German deserved to be treated so bestially in East Prussia in January 1945? Or in Poland and Czechoslovakia after the surrender?

Grey areas.

One thing is certain. What that little man in loin clothes said many decades ago is true. Pity that men like Stalin and Hitler did not listen to it. Is Gandhi understood and listened to even today?

Anyway.

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How the Allies (excluding Russia) dealt with Waffen SS soldiers at the fag end of WW2 is relevant even today.

In times of crisis how far can a democracy compromise with it's core values? 9/11. Guantanamo Bay.

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For most of us history is what we learnt at school, read in the papers or gleaned from movies.

Unfortunately it does not give a complete picture of history. It is history as victors have given out. I refer to the Second World War.

This site is about the story of the other side. The German side. After it lost the war.

The suffering of Germans. How the Allies dealt with a nation which had fallen on its knees.

The victorious allies were no saints as we shall find out.

Narrative of a German soldier on the Ostfront

‘This is the craziest place imaginable. The Russians are often only twenty or thirty metres away, sometimes at hand-grenade range in front of us. No more than 200 metres in front of us there is a deep trench, and this trench leads right down to the banks of the Volga. From there Ivan gets reinforcements every night. For days now we’ve all been waiting impatiently to be relieved, or at least to receive reinforcements, but we’re beginning to doubt whether they’ll ever come.READ MORE

The roots of the crimes....

In October 1944, in an "Appeal to the Red Army" the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote:

"Kill, Kill! There are no innocent Germans, among the living, or among those yet to be born! Carry out Comrade Stalin's instructions to crush the fascist beast in his lair Shatter the pride [78] of the Germanic women with violence. Take them as lawful spoils. Kill, kill, valiant soldiers of the Red Army, in your irresistible onslaught. " (Cited by Admiral Doenitz in 10 Years and 20 Days, pp. 343-344)